It's time to pick up the political analysis of that beloved card game that occupies the mind of its fans so thoroughly that they refer to it as the only game that matters. Since my last post, I heard from some Rugby fans that they found it funny that somebody else considers the game 'the only game that matters' because clearly Rugby is the only game that matters. I guess.In any case, last time I talked about the deck-building game and now it's time to get into the actual game game. The only game that matters, folks, the Game of Thrones (﻿﻿The Card Game Second Edition, ﻿﻿that is, which I will henceforth refer to simply as 'Thrones').1

The road to victoryThe goal of the game is to get to 15 power before your opponent does. That's kind of a strange goal, and I'll talk about power in a moment but first it's important to note that the way you get there, the strategy you adopt can vary greatly. This is where the deck-building game I discussed previously cannot be totally left behind - for different decks dictate different ways to play the game. Good games, it is known, offer multiple paths for victory. Not so for good decks: some great decks force you into a very specific path if you want to win with them. Playing with these decks would not be fun if they were the only decks in the world. As it is, a big part of playing the game is knowing the deck you're playing and you can't win without playing to your deck's strengths.

For example, a while ago played against an unusual Stark banner of the Lion deck. Stark has a strong military presence and a good amount of tools that let you kill your opponent's characters and it works well with the Lannister package of Tyrion's gold and Jaime's military prowess. Though it goes against the theme (in the game jargon, it's not Nedly) it's a pretty common build that tends to hit hard and fast, wiping the board (by killing characters) and adding insult to injury by dominating economically with Lannister gold. And so, when I faced that deck and saw that my opponent started off with no military icons, I thought he was just being unlucky - that his deck was misfiring. So I went after him, putting an early pressure with military challenges to make sure I get a board advantage. Little did I know, he got exactly what he wanted. His deck was focused on having his own characters die (or be sacrificed) and gain power using Catelyn and Joffrey. Once I realized that he really likes having his characters killed, I stopped pushing for the military challenges - but he was already quite close to winning. That deck would not beat me twice in a row (for the record, it didn't beat me even once) - as soon as you know what's it's trying to do, it's much easier to thwart.

The point is just that a big part of the game is figuring out what's your opponent is trying to do, what kind of deck do they have. To a certain degree, you can know much about it by knowing the faction well but as the card pool grows, they offer more variety and more options. Reading your opponent, and avoiding telegraphing your own goals, is a big part of what you can and should do your opponent. And some of it is just the number of military icon on the board and what that tells your opponent about your plans.

Ok, enough with the deck building. On to the game. That one, that matters. One of the unique features of Thrones is that unlike many others 1v1 card games (and especially Magic: The Gathering), there are three different ways to hurt your opponent, and you are constantly choosing which of them you use. Typically, each of your characters can only participate in one of these so-called challenges so you have to choose wisely about which of them to use for each challenge. As we said, there are three types of challenges and we shall now explore the game through each one of them: power, military and intrigue.

The abstract nature of powerNow that we're finally done with deckbuilding (or are we? It really comes up a lot) we can turn to the game, the goal of which is to gain 15 power. What is power? And why 15? No such answers are provided. The ultimate currency of the game (which really should have been named something else, power is so confused as players constantly refer to characters' strength as 'power') is actually quite abstract - a vague commodity, the winning of which represents... well, it's not really clear. But hey, you might say, it's thematic! (aka Nedly) It really represents the source material! I don't think so. In Westeros, power resides wherever people believe it resides, it's shifts arbitrarily - not meticulously accumulated by whoever has the best draw economy. In the game of thrones you famously win by not dying, which is typically achieved by having lots of gold, soldiers, territories and all the rest of the stuff in the game. The fact that the game has this abstract vague goal means you can have a giant army, a lot of money and still lose because your opponent lost enough battles in The Boneway or some other ridiculous reason (try: blocked all attacks against The Wall and lost each one of them; schemed successfully in the Small Council Chamber (not even in the council, but in the chamber); let Benjen Stark die; placed one random person's head on a spike). From a thematic standpoint, it's bizarre.

But in truth, it's one of the things that make this game brilliant. It doesn't stem from fidelity to the source material but from loyalty to Eurogames design principles. The original designer of the game, the ingenious Eric M. Lang, is one of the pioneers of a game genre that I call 'hybrid' because it aims to mesh together the caricatures of the so-called American style game (aka 'Amerithrash') with Euro-style games. His Chaos in the Old World was one of the first of these, and most innovative, in the category (among my favorites are Kemet, City of Remnants and Wars of the Roses; Also, Lang's most recent and celebrated Blood Rage which I own but to my shame have never played). Thrones was designed long before any of those but the main idea is pretty similar: a rich thematic slugfest where you can destroy your opponent but you can't win if you don't worry about resource management and efficiency. Power in Thrones is basically what victory points are in any Euro-game: an artificial game concept that exists solely to measure your progress towards winning at the expense of (and not on the basis of) your other more material assets (money, land, army etc.).2

Yes, that's right. The main feature of the two players' race to that golden threshold of 15 is that it takes place at the expanse of gaining all the things that real Westerosi care about. Unlike, for example, A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, where your victory is measured by the number of castles and strongholds you control, which also produce soldiers and supply - in Thrones the choice to accumulate power usually comes at the expanse of trying to harm your opponent. You have to balance strengthening your board position with the mad rush to the win. And it's always a kind of a rush, because in the end - having 14 power is meaningless. If you rushed to the win, got to 14 power but neglected to build your board - you might find yourself slowly being dragged down, downsized back to a power level that matches your presence, even losing. Much of the dynamic is familiar from a variety of well-loved Euro-games (from the simple Splendor, through the more stylized Spyrium and all the way to big classics like Agricola): at what point do you stop working on building your engine and switching to operating it so it would generate the ever-so-beautiful-in-their-meaninglessness victory points? Some of it is, as discussed, in the deck construction. Not all decks are designed to generate power in the same timing or speed. But much of it is in the dynamics of the game and reading your opponent is often trying to figure out how long they're planning for and what timing you can hit them with. It's not so different from RTS video games in this way: lots of strategies revolve around timing. Most games will see one player getting ahead and then trying to 'close' the game. The mechanics, and specifically the beautiful feature of the plot deck (which lets players choose 7 cards that are not shuffled into their deck but instead played once per round; this allows them to save certain powerful effects that they can play 'on demand' in specific rounds), allow players to prepare for this closure with a special plot (such as The Winds of Winter, Rise of the Krakenor A Tourney for the King). Failing to play these at the right time is likely a loss of the game. If you try to close when you're not situated for it, you might blow your 2-claim plot; if you don't close when you need to, you might allow your opponent to mount a comeback. Timing is key in the rush for power.

Now that we have a clear sense of the way the struggle for power takes place, and we have our eyes on that prize that wins the game, it's time to talk about the way to get there. The actual battle for the board.

The stressful paranoia of military presence (or lack thereof) The heart of the game is the characters on the board. As is appropriate for a game based on a popular franchise, a large part of the game revolves around control iconic characters from the story, oversee their triumph or be responsible for the terrible demise. Characters are not everything in the game: some decks rely heavily on locations, others on important kill events and combos with plots. But characters are the meat and potato of the game. They are what you spend most of your gold for. They comprise the biggest part of your board presence. They take center stage at the challenges phase, which is the longest and most central phase of the game. And they are what your opponent will be looking to destroy, especially early in the game.

And that's where Thrones really shines, because it uses the mechanic of uniquecharacters. Normal characters are deployed (or marshaled) when they are needed and they are a lot like creatures in Magic or various other card games where you draw a card and can play it if you have enough resources. Unique characters are not like the other cards because they care about what's already been played. A unique character can only be played once, so if Tyrion is on the board, you can't play another copy of him. And when he dies, he's dead for good (at least for that game) and if you draw any more copies of him, they are just useless cards in your hand. In Magic, your discard pile is called 'graveyard' but in Thrones there's regular discard and then there's the dead pile, which is an actual graveyard: a heap of cards that you know can never come back into the game.

Well, with some exceptions. For some reason, Summer the direwolf can bring a Stark child back to life, usually Bran or Arya. You can play a plot that takes one character from your dead pile back to your regular (turns out he wasn't dead, it was just a close call), Aeron Damphair can use resuscitation to bring back to life people who drowned or were put to the sword and we all know that Targaryens, and especially dragons, are never really dead. BUT OTHER THAN THAT, for now at least, when someone is dead - they're dead for the game.

here are several ways in which this simple mechanic affects the way players interact. Most importantly, it raises the stakes considerably. When you have Tywin Lannister or Daenerys Targaryen on the board, you don't want them to die. You're going to do what you can to protect them - give them a bodyguard, surround them with companions who can take the hit and do your best to counter your opponent's attempts for assassination (aka 'targeted kill'). The moment where a key character in you deck - in your faction - dies, is a sad and difficult moment. Overcoming that catastrophe and keeping your cool is crucial for winning the game. Because it's going to happen. In Game of Thrones, all men must die and in the game characters frequently do.

But the possibility of death doesn't just raises the stakes before the inevitable demise of your favorite dwarf but after it as well. What's great about the mechanic of death (because there isn't much that's great about actual death) is it's not just interesting strategically, but also makes for a great story. Each game you play creates, as part of the gameplay, an accompanying story. In recounting the game you would tell you friends something like the following:

Tyrion was getting some work done but then a dragon burned him. I was trying to stabilize but then a Dornish Paramour was able to seduce Jaime and he got burnt as well. The paramour had total control over Cersei and the situation was looking dire for my Lannisters but then Ser Ilyn Payne showed up and started chopping up heads the of paramours and dragons alike. Without her dragons, Dany wasn't as big a threat and I was able to hold her off until Tywin showed up and closed the deal.

The death of a unique character is so significant, both thematically and mechanically, that it punctuates the game experience. The game moves from the tension of keeping these preciously vulnerable characters alive to the heroism of defeating your opponent despite the fact that half of your faction's main characters are dead. And so, it captures the spirit of the world and story without tying you too closely to the plot of the originals. Sure, sometimes Ned Stark gets his head put on a spike and that makes everybody exclaim in unison, 'how Nedly!' but just as often it'll be Ned that puts Tywin to the sword using the Stark ancestral sword, Ice. I noted that some strange decks benefit from the death of the characters (through Joffrey's sociopathy or Catelyn's masochism) but in most games, you constantly worry about having enough people so that one or two can die and it won't be the end of the world. The military challenge is a constant form of pressure on the board of awesome characters that drive the story and you the player to your eventual destiny: victory or defeat.Intrigue's lack of subtlety The last type of challenge is intrigue, and if you win that you can discard a card at random from your opponent's hand. That challenge goes hand to hand with cards that let you draw from your deck - a pretty powerful effect, according to popular wisdom. The more you can draw, the more you can compensate for suffering losses in intrigue challenges and the more you gain what the experts call - wait for it, because this is getting technical - 'card advantage'.

Usually, in card games, it's pretty difficult to get card advantage. You have to have a special discard or draw spell, or force your opponent into an unfavorable trade. You have to pay the cost of the special effect, use a card for it and so forth. But in Thrones, the competition for card advantage is built into the challenge phase through the intrigue challenge. If the power challenge is all about finding out the tricky point at which you need to switch gears from killing to gaining power, and the military challenge is all about making sure you have enough people that can die - intrigue challenge is the most straightforward one, letting you choke your opponent's option by taking cards from his hands and discarding them.

Intrigue challenges (and associated effects of course) are the main reason you'll often hear Thrones players ask each other 'how many cards do you have in hand?' That's an important data point at any card game but in Thrones it's always a tactical point as well. The number of cards in my opponent's hand is tells me what are the odds that a randomly discarded card is that Balon he just summoned or that annoyingly ever-bouncing Hound. It's a representation of how many options he has beyond what's currently on the table, and if their board state is not that great - it might be time to go after that hand and eliminate their future.

Intrigue provokes the image of sneaky assassins and shadowy characters, but in Thrones it is the card game equivalent of going into someone's house and breaking their stuff. It's as subtle as a hammer to the face. It's a constant threat to you private hand of cards: use them or lose them. Though some factions are better at intrigue than others, all could just initiate an intrigue challenge and go after your hand.

The main implication of the intrigue challenge is that cards in hand are not, as in other card games, private property. You cannot really hold them close to your chest as your opponent can always swing at them. As far as I can tell, going after your opponent's hand is currently a viable strategy: you intrigue them until they have nothing in hand, and they are left with no choice but to play what they draw (aka 'topdecking').

The intricate combination of the game's components The three different types of challenges is at the heart of Thrones as a game. The dynamic of playing the game - and the mind games between opponents - often revolves around which of the challenges (as well as the so-called 'fourth challenge', dominance) is more important at any given time. The answer to this question varies with the timing in the game's arc (military more important early, power later), the faction you're running, the type of deck, the strategy you're pursuing and the board state. Evaluating these factors and building a game plan is the strategic skill required for the game. But what's really beautiful about the challenges as a game mechanic is that they really represents different ways of hurting your opponent, different things you can do to your opponent. There are a ton of other game effects that different cards can trigger but most of them are akin to one of the challenges. Fools draw cards for you (with their 'insight') or discard you cards, and so they fit with intrigue challenges. Kill affects compound military claims and are often triggered by military challenges. Gaining power effects are often done by taking it from your opponent's house card. When you play the game, you might focus on effects rather than the actual challenges but most of them are in the 'mindset' of one of these challenges. And playing the game is balancing these three mind-sets.

Which is why Thrones is such a rewarding political experience, even in a two player game. Unlike most two player games, you're not just destroying your opponent by overwhelming them with force and punching them until some 'life' track hits zero. Thrones lets you toy with your opponent. It lets you start slow and then spring to victory, or lose a few battles just so you can win the war. Your opponents needs to figure that's what you're doing or they are done You can frustrate your opponent by taking away their options, wait them out with a long con or overwhelm them with force. There's an element of guessing and bluffing built into the structure of the game. The brilliance of Thrones is that these options do not depend on fancy card abilities, but they are in the structure of the game. If all cards were blanks and only had icons and strength, you could still build a deck that's all about frustrating your opponent or play around with the timing of a rush to power. And my favorite part about it is that all of these are really tied well to the theme - go heavy on intrigue really feels like getting inside your opponent's camp and going for military feels like trying to crash them. This is the core strength of the game, and with that - I conclude my political analysis of it.

Thoughts/comments/questions/suggestions welcomed!1. This post only discusses the 2 player head to head format known as joust. I'm not referring at all to the 3-6 players version, known as melee, not because I don't think it's important but because I sadly have only played it once.

2. As a side note, since this makes power challenges pretty useless early on and pretty boring in general, the game designers spiced them up with cards like Support of the People and Plaza of Punishment; the fact they exist create more tension in early game power challenges and reduces the predictability of the challenge phase. But the designers were careful to make these effects limited and few, so that they don't change the fundamental structure of the game and the nature of power as an abstract goal akin to victory points.

One reason I haven't been playing many board games in the past months is that my precious gaming time has recently been dedicated to one game, and one game only, that some people call, and not without merit, the only game that matters.

A Game of Thrones: The Card Game 2nd Edition (fondly referred to as 2.0 by its cult-like fanship) is a living card game. Supposedly, that's because the game itself is alive and evolving - every month (or so), a new pack of cards is released and changes the game completely. But it's also because it is one of these games that some people call a 'life-style' game - you can literally make this game into your life style, your only hobby, your main obsession. It's an interesting experience to step out of one hobby community, the board gaming world, and step into a completely different one - the Thrones community, which is a part of the LCG community if it's part of anything. A lot is very similar, much is different. I came to Thrones with the same love of games that brought me to board gaming - for me it playing Thrones is a similar experience to playing other games, except there's a somewhat structured competitive play. But for the lifers, the people who play Thrones (and other LCGs) as their main hobby, the game is something totally different. One of the main reasons I play games is to clear my head - to engage super seriously in a taxing and challenging competition that I know, in the back of of the back of the back my mind, will not have any real impact on my life prospects. Unlike the challenges of work, school, parenting, family and life in general - the ones I encounter at the gaming table, aren't really that important, in the grand scheme of things. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite competitive and I like winning. Games are important in the moment because I made them important. And that's what's unique about games - you can spend a lot of time and energy on a serious challenge that would nonetheless won't affect you're prospects in life.

But when lifers want to get away from real life they don't play a game, they play Thrones. And they do so extremely seriously. The competitive scene of Thrones that I've tasted since the second edition was launched is simply amazing. There are an impressive array of really smart people who are not only good at this game, they are dedicated. They work at this game after hours - building decks, testing them, playing against themselves, playing against each other, making videos, writing articles, rating cards, recording podcasts, collecting and analyzing data, posting winning deck lists, recordingsomemorepodcasts, creating websites to manage decks or analyze setups or run tournaments and whatever else you can think of. And so much of it is geared towards helping new players get into the game, sharing helpful tips with others, discussing tactics and perceptions endlessly, debating rules and lots of other things. And that what makes it a community - people working together towards maintaining an enterprise that is larger than them. I've said here before that every competitive play is a cooperative effort on the meta-game - where we agree to play together by the rules. That's true about a single evening with a Kemetskirmish that's wild and aggressive and is done after an hour. It's true on a larger scale when we're talking about maintaining a competitive environment for such a complicated game, for some many people. It's just fun and inspiring to be able to join a community and be a part of it so quickly, enjoying all the free labor of smart wonderful people. And it's fun to be part of something that's really challenging in a way that I have not yet experienced in tabletop gaming.

That being said, I don't know how much longer I can keep up with it. The game is indeed living, and though it's probably one of the best games I have ever played - my insatiable appetite for variety in gaming is starting to take over me. I might go back soon to my old habits of moving from game to game like a monkey hopping from one tree branch to another. It's also really hard to keep up with the game and keep playing well, when so many new cards come out every month and change the meta. The game doesn't only rewards commitment, it requires it (if you want to play reasonably well). And I'm not sure I can keep up with it for very much longer. So before I fall behind or move to the next thing, I decided to sit down and summarize some thoughts about the game because it really is freaking incredible.

Last disclaimer - though I have been playing the game quite a bit since 2.0 was launched, I have not played the previous version or any of the other LCGs/CCGs (apart from dabbling a bit in Magic in my youth). Since the card pool is still pretty small, some of the veterans players feel like the experience of the game is still not what it's meant to be. My perspective is therefore that of a new player who has only played this recent iteration of the game and have played lots of other games, though not much any LCGs. (note: this post turned out long - so I divided it into two parts; this part discusses the deck-building aspect of the game, and the next will discuss the actual game)

First: The Deck-Building Game (the actual metagame)

There are actually two games that involved in playing an LCG. One is the actual game, which involves playing cards that represents characters and location, accumulating power, engaging in intrigue to discard cards from your opponent's hand and killing your opponent's characters. But while you're playing that game, every LCG involves another, much more complicated, game: that of designing, building and testing a deck. Properly, that's a meta-game - though some players distinguish between playing the 'meta' (which means adjusting your deck to what you think you'll encounter in a particular setting, like a tournament) and building your deck, more generally, which involves the skill of evaluating particular cards, balancing the different components, testing and tweaking, figuring out answers to other existing decks and of course - figuring out a winning strategy for the deck. To add to the confusion, the common lingo among Thrones players (as the game is affectionately called) is to call local gaming groups 'meta', presumably because each of them develops a common set of beliefs and fashions that make for a unique meta-game. But the truth is that the real metas cross geographic areas - by playing online, watching youtube videos, co-hosting podcasts and so forth - the group of people that is playing the same meta is not necessarily geographic, though local groups remain important. A few people play in several metas or in an overall cross-metas meta.

In any case, the two kinds of deck-building games are both very important, and the designers clearly care about both experiences of deck-building, making them challenging as well as exciting. There are cards whose in-game effects are, at least in my humble opinion, not very interesting: they close, rather than open, decision-making options, and they don't really require much skill to exploit or even play against. Yet they often open very interesting deck-building decisions create cool dynamics in the deck-building meta-game. For example, the Iron Throne has a passive ability that doesn't have to be triggered and cannot be canceled, and it effectively ensures you win the dominance phase on most turns. Sometimes it will effect your decisions by allowing you to attack with more characters without losing dominance, or forcing your opponent to keep a few characters back just so he wouldn't lose it. But even in these rarer cases, the decision is usually a no-brainier. So the Iron Throne is something that you're typically happy to see on your side of the board, it has no great downside (it's not very expensive) and it's doing you a bit of good every turn. But when you build your deck you will soon discover that it's pretty hard to find the room for the Iron Throne in your deck. With so many other good locations, making the Iron Throne works meaning building around it, at least to some extent. It is easier in some decks than in others - Baratheon has a lot of cards that make it worthwhile for you to win dominance. In other houses, you have to work harder to make the Iron Throne work. But the interesting decisions that this card brings to the game are not made when it's on the table or even in your hand - it's in the deck construction. To build a good deck that uses the iron throne you have to adjust your plot deck, your play style and your path to victory. Someone picking up your deck wouldn't know how to play it well if they didn't know how it was built. The deck building is right there at the heart of playing the game - when you play with a certain deck, you might not have as many paths to victory or grand strategic decisions. Those were already made in the deck construction - all you have to do now is 'pilot' it well, weathering the unexpected weather and dodging the bullets that your opponents fires. But you can only use whatever was loaded onto your aircraft beforehand, in the deck-building.

﻿﻿﻿The Iron Throne is also a good example of the importance of playing the 'meta' (that is, playing according to the environment you're in) - an Iron Throne in one deck counters completely an Iron Throne in another deck. Since they cancel each other out, the state of affairs where all decks have the Iron Throne is decidedly worse than those when none have it: it's basically a dead card taking up a slot that could have been used for a useful location. Nonetheless, if everybody you play with - all the people in your 'meta' - have the Iron Throne in their decks, you might have to include it as well or else be disadvantaged regularly. If it drops out of most decks, it becomes more of a matter of fitting it in your deck by making sure you get your mileage out of it in some way.

The deck-building game is a very complicated one and it's really in that game that the most committed players are rewarded most. It's a deep game but it's also very wide: there are a lot of cards involved, even with the relatively small card pool, and each card has a variety of parameters you have to consider. But that's not even all of it - to build a good deck you have to a good understanding of other decks out there and what they can do. You have to be able to provide your pilot with tools to counter them or at least work around their tricks. Even if you don't build around the Iron Throne, you have to be prepared for a deck that wins dominance easily and exploits it to gain power quickly or card advantage. Either you include in your deck a card that destroys or neutralizes the Iron Throne, or you build a deck that wins so fast that dominance becomes irrelevant, or you do something else to work around it. And the best part in the deck-building game is that testing your deck, a crucial part of the process, means playing the actual game which is a super awesome game. Paying to test a deck and playing to win is not always the same thing, but it's only through playing a bunch of games that you can learn how to build a deck or even just adjust an existing deck list.

As I said, the deck-building process is one of balancing a variety of different consideration. In the game itself, each card in your deck has just one use - it can be played for its effect by paying its gold or else it can be discarded from your hand by some nasty effect (so you can think of cards as fodder for such discard, protecting other more valuable cards; this is called using them as 'intrigue claim soak'). Many other modern card games, whether classics like Glory to Rome (and all of its successors), Race for the Galaxy and Twilight Struggle or smaller games like Summoner Wars and Red7, have realized that part of the fun in card games is that you can use cards in variety of ways. They make you choose whether you want to use a card for its effect or as resource, sometimes using the card's rotation and placement for different effects. As noted, the cards in thrones can be used in-game in only one way (or as claim soak) but in the deck-building game each has a variety of different roles: they take up slots in your deck according to their cost, their effect, their kind and so forth. Each card matters for it can do, but also for its place on the cost curve, whether or not it can be used on set-up, whether it survives the first snow of winter and many other considerations. What this means is that if you remove or replace just one or two cards in your deck, it often sends a ripple effect throughout your deck and requires you to make a variety of changes. For example, when The Road to Winterfell expansion pack came out I really wanted, like many others, to add Nymeria Sand to all my Martell decks. Adding a 5-cost character is not something you can do without interfering with your cost curve - the first question to ask is: can I afford to play another 5 gold character given my existing gold resources? Even if I add Nymeria by removing some other 5 gold character, I have to think about the different challenge icons that might be disturbed by the replacement. If I take out Arianne to add Nymeria, I make other cards (such as Areo) less useful in my deck. Or, in a different context, adding Nymeria to my Night's Watch/Martell deck makes me all of a sudden much more vulnerable to cards like Milk of the Poppy (as most of my Night's Watch characters cannot be targeted by Milk and Nymeria suffers from it more than others) - does that mean I need to add to my decks some Milk counters (in this case, attachment control cards, like Confiscation)? The chain of effects is endless. Adding Confiscation to your deck changes your gold curve as well as your ability control initiative, which might mean you can't enjoy the benefits of some other cards in your deck like Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken or Sunspear. Removing those would mean you are more vulnerable to some other game effect and so the process goes on and on.._. A good deck is a balanced construction where all the bits fits together nicely. You want to have enough gold to play what you need, but you don't want to have gold wasting while you have no cards in hand - so your income needs to be balanced by draw, or other ways to get card advantage. Some experience players talk about individual cards in terms of the absolute value (how efficient or cost-effective they are, for example) and there is certainly a great deal of value in that kind of talk. But it seems to me that the real value of each card really depends on the deck it is in, and even the best of cards (which include fan favorites like Tywin, Tyrion and Robert Baratheon but also obscure locations like Ghaston Grey) really shine if they are put in a deck that has room for them. A really good card - like Tyrion - will always be good and can fit in almost any deck. But its value varies in different deck; if you add him to your Targaryen-Lannister deck alongside Daenerys, Jaime, Drogo and Illyrio, you might have a hard time playing him as well as all your other high cost character. In contrast, in an event heavy deck that uses the gold Tyrion makes, such as Lannister-Lord of the Crossing (aka Leaping Lions) he really is among the best of the best.

So what do we make of the deck-building game? For many people it's kind of a solo game, which doesn't really lend itself to much player interaction of the kind that warrants political analysis. But the interesting thing is, it turns out that the deck-building game is actually a cooperative game - a genre that lends itself well for solo gaming but also offers many great social opportunities. Deck-building, you will find, takes a surprisingly large part of the time you spend on this game (frustratingly, as does sleeving cards) but it's also something that many people do in the company of others. People post their decks for comments when they build them or in pride when they've won tournaments with them. Building a deck is such a huge part of the fun that there are probably just as many videos and podcasts of people building decks as there are of people playing. Following, and picking apart, the process of somebody's deck building is just as interesting and challenging as thinking of all their in-game decisions. It's really a big deal, and a huge part of the skill involved. Because it's a cooperative/solo game, what it does is partly what cooperative games do more generally: gives people roles, allow specialization and foster camaraderie. It also suffers from the problems of a cooperative game: quarterbacking, some people not really participating, the feeling that it's basically a puzzle we're all staring at together. And it doesn't enjoy the benefit of modern cooperative games' design, where the designer is paying close attention to these problems and attempts to overcome them. But the designers are clearly thinking of the deck-building and planting little wonderful puzzles in there, and it poses you the challenge of working together to solve them.

Posting your deck list, and explaining why and how you got to it, is an individual contribution to the communal enterprise of 'solving' the meta-game. It gives you an opportunity to be smart and shine but it also invites feedback, pushback and constructive criticism. And though some people are solitary geniuses, most people really need the support of a team in order to play the deck-building game well. So much so that some people claim that Thrones is actually a team game - a game where different metas work separately to try and 'solve' the metagame, meeting in tournaments with their respective refined solutions where all members of the meta are playing the same deck (with some small variations). This is, of course, a provocative view that many think undermine the competitive spirit of tournament play, where prizes are given to individuals, not teams. But it illustrates that the deck-building game is actually very similar to many other cooperative games, and it benefits (in both level of achievement as well as enjoyment) from bringing together a few minds to work at it.

And so, this is the great reveal: the deck-building game is not a solo game, but a cooperative one. For most experienced Thrones players (and I assume other LCGs as well), this is not a great reveal. But for many others, this can be an episode of 'you're doing it wrong' - if you've been building your decks on your own, in the darkness, as you sip dark wine solemnly and silence or jazz music engulfs you - you are probably having fun. But next time you go to a meetup - consider spending some time working with your friends on the deck you're building. And while you're at it, do it like you're playing Pandemic - with your hand of cards on the table. talking to them about your choices and getting their feedback. It's not just that they're doing you a favor or that you're giving up your secrets - it's the group of you putting your minds together to tackle a task that's clearly larger than most of us. When you play a competitive game, you don't want your opponent to know what's in your deck. But when you're deck-building, keeping back information stands in the way of both success and enjoyment.

However, there's a catch. Though the deck-building game is a cooperative game, it's not explicitly so. Which means - the game doesn't tell you to show your cards, or gives you specific roles or structures the interaction to make sure it works well and it's fun for everyone. That means that when you're playing the deck-building game, all of that is on you - you should make sure you're playing to your strengths, or that you're avoiding quarterbacking (aka 'alpha' gaming). That's not so difficult, if you think about it for two seconds - we do lots of things cooperatively in life. But that's why it seemed worthwhile to point out that way deck-building is basically a cooperative game. If you're only playing it solo - you're missing out on half of the fun.

Every now and then I intend to shine a spotlight on one particular game and offer a political analysis of that game. I will usually consider political games, but there could be some other games every now and then. In any case, for the first spotlight I decided to go for the mother of all political games - Diplomacy. A (no longer so) recent episode of This American Life (based on this fabulous piece, written about a particularly vicious tournament) has reminded me that there's no better way to start that with the game that got me started with this board game madness, though I didn't even know it at the time. I want to retell that story briefly.

I was introduced to the game Diplomacy, believe it or not, as part of a course on international relations. Needless to say, it was a terrible pedagogical tool - we learned nothing about diplomacy or international relations from it, and what happened in our game was far from teaching us history. But it was a great deal of fun and we were so excited about it that we started what is still, to this day, one of the best gaming experiences of my life. We started an ongoing diplomacy game where we make a move once a week - leaving the board set up in our dorm room, and allowing diplomatic communication to take place at any time or place and in any shape or form.

We never finished that game. A few weeks into the game, Austria had a nervous breakdown. He has been down to one unit in the middle of the board and had no chances of winning. He couldn't care less about the game anymore but kept on playing as a good sportsman. Though he was all but dead, his support was crucial and the pressure was intense. The alliance from the East pestered him during the day and the alliance from the West during the night (we shared a room). Both had part in his demise and eventually he couldn't take it anymore and decided he's not giving any more orders. We couldn't find a fair arrangement or a replacement, so the game stood still in the winter of 1911 (or whatever it was). Nobody flipped the table, instead the board just set there - froze in time. Diplomacy didn't just provide the best gaming experience of my life, it was responsible for the worst one. After that epic game, I fell in love with the game. I took it withe me everywhere and taught people how to play in bus stations and vacation homes. I tried playing impromptu sessions of the game with people I knew just five minutes. But Diplomacy doesn't work well with few players and in short sessions. It requires a whole day and seven committed people. And those things are hard to come by. So I reached out to the world and was delighted to learn that there's a dedicated community of Diplomacy players out there and among other things, they run tournaments. Imagine my delight! If you know the game, you will not be surprised to hear that the tournament was a total disaster. Not only because I lost miserably to, among others, a 12 year old who was playing with a partner (though it's never fun to lose). But because those people made me feel awful in a variety of ways I didn't know was possible. They made me feel stupid, which is a pretty common feeling to have when you fail in a strategy game. But they also made me feel immoral and untrustworthy, and then totally gullible and naive. I left the place stressed out and upset, and I didn't play Diplomacy (or any other board game) again for quite a while (a few years later, thankfully, Settlers of Catan carved my way back to the hobby)

What is it about diplomacy that makes it the friendship ruining game that it is? As big strategy games go, it is pretty simple to explain. It is a tight area control game where the competition over the geography is intense. Controlling the map is the objective of the game and it's also how you get more army. It's a classic rich-get-richer dynamic that characterizes old-school dudes-on-a-map games. The geography also dictates who your friends are and who you can harm (usually these are the same people). The units on the map are equal in strength, there are only two kinds of units (armies and fleets) and the orders you can give them are pretty straightforward: move, support, hold. The battle system is what people call (in my opinion, wrongly) deterministic, which means that whoever has more units wins. In cases of a tie, there is a stalemate. Strategically, the game is all about positioning your units in the right places and striking in the right time. I have played Diplomacy as a two player game a few times. It has a chess-like feel, coupled with the guessing mind games that is all the rage in Rock, Paper, Scissors. It's pretty enjoyable, but that is not what makes Diplomacy ticks.

The following discusses some mechanics that make Diplomacy work as the political game that it is. By no means is this a comprehensive review of all the game has to offer. I look at these mechanics not from the perspective of the game design or the strategic player. I look at them from the perspective of the political GAmer.

Simultaneous action selection and Execution

By far the most important feature of the game is the way orders and placed and executed. Diplomacy pioneered in modern board games the style which centers around simultaneous action selection (SAS henceforth) and it's still, as far as I'm aware, one of the most extreme application of this mechanic. What do I mean by extreme? In Diplomacy, all the orders you give in the game are given, and executed, while other players are giving theirs. There is no decision you ever make in Diplomacy that is taken with a set board: while your units are moving, others are as well. There is always uncertainty about the situation you're in.

This is radical. SAS is a controversial mechanic. Some players love it and others hate it. From a design standpoint, it's very hard to design SAS mechanics. It's not a coincidence that Diplomacy requires this kind of technical guide if you want to resolve it without contradictions and crazy business. Moreover, you typically would want to limit your usage of SAS because it causes frustration for players who want to have control. Other games that include SAS mitigate its effects by limiting its scope. In A Game of Thrones: The Board Game, inspired by Diplomacy, players place their orders simultaneously but execute them in turn order. You get to see the board before you decide where your march. Wars of the Roses does the same thing. Cosmic Encounter, Dune/Rex, Kemet and Tiny Epic Kingdoms use SAS only for battle resolution. Other games, like Twilight Struggle and A Game of Thrones: LCG, use it only for a special phase each turn. The only other games I can think of that focus on SAS to that extent are drafting games such as 7 Wonders and Sushi Go, and they are significantly lighter and shorter.

SAS is the heart of diplomacy and it's responsible for much of its dismal reputation. SAS creates an environment of extreme uncertainty and when people have to make decisions in such conditions they become very paranoid. Not only does SAS encourage suspicion and distrust, but it also generates a great deal of anger and pain in the common case where one has been screwed over. If you didn't anticipate your foe's moves, not only are you not prepared for them but you also, at the same time, did something completely stupid. SAS is really punishing because it doesn't even allow you to pull back once the betrayal has been discovered. Your troops have received their orders, and now you just watch them march to their doom.

With superior units, one can guarantee a conquest and there's a variety of ways to guarantee a stalemate. But the former is rare and the latter does not tend to deliver victory. What SAS brings to a game is tension, frustration and a healthy dose of distrust. Tension in the anticipation of the move, frustration because you once again was acting on false assumption and distrust of people who can't show you what they're up to until they've already done it. SAS makes it very hard to cooperate because it's really hard to show good faith.

Any game that uses SAS is bound to have a taste of the poisonous relationships diplomacy fosters. Even Tiny Epic Kingdoms turn epicly sour when an alliance is broken or a battle goes badly for someone. The greater the importance of the actions done simultaneously, the more corrosive the effect.

In Diplomacy, everything is done simultaneously. So the atmosphere of distrust and suspicion is constant. The hurdles on the way to cooperation is unrelenting. But that is not all, because in Diplomacy, SAS is accompanied by a few other poison inducing mechanics, that complement SAS like cookies to a cake. Poisoned cookies to a poisoned cake.

Stalemate and Support

Set in Europe right before World War I, Diplomacy makes the thematically appropriate choice of making stalemates quite common. This is a major design flaw in this wonderful game because it makes the game awful in at least two ways. First, the game can literally last forever, and many games actually do (or they approximate it for all intents and purposes). Second, it's not so rare to have a turn where literally nothing happened. It's hardly exciting to go through the trouble of a whole round and look at the board to see that nothing had changed. In a typical game, that can happen several times. And once alliances have consolidated and players skills are matched, it's not unusual to see this more often than not.

But stalemates are awful in yet another, wonderful, way. Stalemates result when equal powers meet and their commonality is a reflection of the way the power is distributed equally between units on the board. This means that players absolutely need each other in order to make something happen. The need for support from other players is what makes SAS so exciting, frustrating and ultimately devastating. It's not only that you don't know what your enemy is doing but you don't even know who your friends are. In Cosmic Encounter, for example, all neutral players declare their support and send their troops. The main combatants then decide what card they play given their odds of winning. If everybody ally against you, there is no reason to throw away that good card you might use later. Or that might be an opportunity to use the 40 and punish all of them together. That is true even for a mean game such as A Game of Thrones: you get to see who betrayed you before you send Ned Stark to die in a hopeless battle.

Not so in Diplomacy. You deploy your troops blindly, hoping for the best but knowing that without that support from somebody else, you will be destroyed. And you can't make it alone - all powers in Diplomacy have too many neighbors, too many potential enemies. Growing strong early makes you a target, but failing to grow means you will definitely be wiped. You have no choice but to put your trust in someone. The only question is who, and that's the nerve-wrecking part. And that's where the next piece of the puzzle comes in.

DiplomacyI've mentioned here before that Diplomacy is actually a weird name for this game because thematically, it's not really about diplomacy. Instead, it's a game about war (and I'll leave the discussion regarding whether or not it merits the label 'war game' to another day). It's a game where you win by controlling Europe which you can do without talking to anybody but you can't do without destroying others. The game has no formal mechanisms for building (and breaking) alliances, signing and negotiating treaties, establishing (or breaking) diplomatic relationships or anything of the sort. All the things that in the real world (and in the period before WWI) are called 'diplomacy' are absent from the game mechanics.

With one exception. The innovative part is that the rules dedicate a game phase for discussion. That is all. The game says you have a limited amount of time to talk and leaves it a that. Unlike Cosmic Encounter, there are no in-game consequence of reaching or failing to reach an agreement: nothing happens if you don't reach an agreement by the allotted time. Unlike Dune/Rex, there is no way to make binding agreements. Unlike Settlers of Catan (or Sheriff of Nottingham and many other trading/negotiation games) - there is absolutely no way of making any trades. I can't give you this if you give me that. I can make an offer and you can agree, but we have no way of trading wood for sheep. It's just talking.

In game theory, cheap talk is a technical term that refers to communication between players that doesn't change the payoff structure. This is often confused because many people believe that the implication of game theory is that all talk is cheap unless there's some third party enforcing it. In particular, many people (including political scientists and such) have come to the conclusion that diplomacy in the real world, for that reason, is cheap talk. This is, of course, false; real diplomacy is not cheap because, first and foremost, it's not cheap. By its technical definition, cheap talk is costless, or as close to it as reasonably possible. Real diplomacy is anything but cheap and there's good evidence that diplomacy is often useful in a variety of ways that changes the payoff structure.

Real world aside, in the game Diplomacy - discussions are cheap talk. Or at least, it's a close to it as you can get. It is designed to artificially create the conditions, actually lacking in real diplomacy, ti make your talk as cheap as possible. Because you can't really seal a deal, and you can't exchange any resource and there is no way to independently verify the validity of the information you get - talk is very cheap.

And yet, even in Diplomacy talk is not completely cheap. Human nature being what it is, players develop social systems of reputation and trust. People build on consideration from inside and outside the game to forge relationships. They use their relatively cheap talk in an environment that's hostile to cooperation and build those ever so precious relationships. This is because at the most crucial part of the process, the negotiation, the game steps back and gives the players space to create their own rules. It's a bit of chaos in a box, that game. That's why you get the widest variety of experience with a game like this and that's also why it ruins friendships: at least with friendships there are rules. Unspoken as they may be, we know that there are certain things you don't do to friends. But there are no such things in Diplomacy; the game provides no such limitations. You can say anything in order to get what you desperately need. Of course, that means lying. But it also means guilting people into making mistakes, cajoling or taunting them, putting them off their game. The game give you a bunch of space for talking but doesn't let you do anything specific with all that talk. You have to find something to do with it, and you may not like what other people find.

Ruining friendships?

There you have it. Diplomacy is a game where you desperately need the help of other players but you have a really hard trusting them. And in that desperate situation you are given no tools to help yourself but unstructured talking. Which leads us to the way Diplomacy makes us treat each other - in a variety of ways. The game puts players in a pressure cooker and it's not a surprise that many of them come out well done. But if there's a game where I've seen amazing alliances going the distance and splitting a shared victory, it's this one. And it's a game where people can, and often do, choose to support someone just because they like him. That's a game where real out-of-the-game charisma is really important.

And that's the game's biggest downside. It raises the stakes too high with its length and intensity and doesn't make any effort to make sure your experience is enjoyable. It's really up to the players. And there are so many ways in which people's expectations can fail to match. One game I played recently online broke down very quickly simply because some players wanted to role-play and negotiate extensively, while others really wanted to just exchange a few 'trash-talk' messages and make a move. Diplomacy reveals the truth that anyone with a bit of training and communication knows: it's not easy. Communication is something that needs to be worked at. Relationships are something that benefit from regular maintenance and really suffer when they are constantly strained by conflicting interests.

The way we treat each other in a game of Diplomacy does not reveal out 'true' nature, as some would say. It's an artificial environment that is designed to make it hard to do what human beings naturally do: form relationship and trust each other. But it does reveal an aspect of our personality and tests it under unfavorable conditions. How far are you willing to go? What will you do in order to win? The game lets you do a great deal to each other, with both virtual sticks and stones but with real words - words that break hearts.